expo: Expo Go on Android fails when EAS Update enabled

In my specific case, I solved this loading failure by removing the runtimeVersion from app.json 😌

@RGDEV2022

1. You can remove runtimeVersion field first, then run expo start once.
2. Try to open your app again with Expo GO. Your android app should run now.
3. After it’s fixed, you can reinsert the runtimeVersion field if you still need it and it will work fine on all future expo start.

Thanks for the report! This should be fixed in the most recent version of Expo Go for Android that was released today.

Thanks for the repro. Looking into it now.

Ah, I was just able to repro this. It seems that having runtimeVersion in the app.json and expo start’ing it as a classic manifest does cause Expo Go to ignore the update since Expo Go only supports the SDK version runtime versions.

Some suggestions:

• To force this to start as a modern manifest, you can run expo start --force-manifest-type=expo-updates. This will make the runtimeVersion behavior slightly different (it’ll turn runtimeVersion: { policy: 'sdkVersion' } into a runtime version compatible with Expo Go).
• Alternatively, removing runtimeVersion from app.json will also work.

That being said, I’m curious what your setup is @Charles-Johnson. What is the value of runtimeVersion for you in app.json? Also, is your expo-updates configured to use classic updates (updates.url field in app.json looks like https://exp.host/@username/slug) or EAS update (updates.url field in app.json looks like https://u.expo.dev/<uuid>)?

I am running into this exact same issue as well. Only way I am able to run in Expo Go in Android is by commenting out the updates.url field in my app config file.

Removing updates.url doesn’t work for me. But doing so does give an error: Uncaught Error: java.lang.Exception: No launchable update was found. If this is a bare workflow app, make sure you have configured expo-updates correctly in android/app/build.gradle. I’m using managed workflow. Interestingly, a Google of this error message shows a longer-standing difference in iOS and Android behaviour.

In general, my impression is that Expo Go is designed to work together with the old-school “expo build” and “expo publish” build process, and shouldn’t really be used together with the new school “eas build”, “eas update”, “custom dev client” approach.

If you are using eas update and eas build then you are much better off building a custom dev client (which fortunately is really easy now).

Apart from these launch failures, testing an update with Expo Go won’t reveal whether it would make your production app crash because it relies on new native code.

For reference:

• https://docs.expo.dev/distribution/runtime-versions/#can-i-test-updates-with-a-custom is the doc for classic updates and the runtimeVersion field.
• https://docs.expo.dev/eas-update/runtime-versions/ is the doc for modern (EAS) update.

@wschurman I’m still experiencing this error but I’m using expo-updates v0.11.7 and expo SDK44. I will test upgrading expo-updates

Hey @wschurman, Seems I got into the issue now. The new update that you released it not working and expo is giving me the same error.

  expo-env-info 1.0.3 environment info:
    System:
      OS: Windows 10 10.0.22000
    Binaries:
      Node: 16.13.2 - D:\nodejs\node.EXE
      Yarn: 1.22.18 - ~\AppData\Roaming\npm\yarn.CMD
      npm: 7.20.6 - ~\AppData\Roaming\npm\npm.CMD
    npmPackages:
      @expo/metro-config: 0.3.16 => 0.3.16
      expo: ^45.0.0 => 45.0.4
      react: 17.0.2 => 17.0.2
      react-dom: 17.0.2 => 17.0.2
      react-native: 0.68.2 => 0.68.2
      react-native-web: 0.17.7 => 0.17.7
    Expo Workflow: managed

Package versions:

"expo": "~45.0.0",
"expo-updates": "~0.13.2",